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This long-term endurance was thanks to a very mundane building material, the ingredients of which remained a mystery until very recently. Far more damage to the Colosseum was done by 15 th century workers who stripped its marble façade and bronze fixtures than in the previous thousand years it spent open to the elements. The astonishing fact was that, after eight centuries of complete neglect, Rome’s infrastructure was remarkably intact. In the 15 th century, with a revival of learning and trade after waves of plague, Renaissance builders began to study the engineering behind the Pantheon and other monumental Roman structures such as the Colosseum, city walls, aqueducts, tombs, and harbor installations. Entering its third millennium, the Pantheon remains the largest freestanding domed structure in the world.Ī cutaway model of the Pantheon. and so survived the wreckers that leveled hundreds of pagan sites across the Roman Empire. The open oculus at its apex has a circumference of 142 feet, proportioned to distribute the roof weight downwards to brace the building without interior support or frame.Ĭonstructed as a temple to all of Imperial Rome’s gods, it was repurposed as a Christian church in 609 C.E. Completed about 126 C.E., its freestanding interior dome is 142 feet high and 142 feet wide.
The Pantheon in Rome is one of the architectural and engineering marvels of what we tend to dismiss as the ancient world. There remain persistent mysteries discovered in the archeological record and ancient texts that contemporary researchers, armed with the latest technologies, are only beginning to decode. Likewise, printing technology quickly obscured centuries of specialized book production that catalogued esoteric knowledge of the cosmos and natural world. Over the ages, great discoveries and useful instruments have been lost and forgotten, only to be invented again centuries later. Technological progress, it turns out, is not a straight line.
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